What's the difference between bishoujo, ren'ai, and dating?

[mikey]

The thing is that as with many if not most intellectual games, they are simply not cool. If you talk about HalfLife2 with your friends, the conversation can be carried out in every public place and simply sounds good (if shallow) - but if you were discussing matters of the heart and what you felt when playing... imagine how ridiculous that must feel for someone profoundly telling you how he made love to all those schoolgirls (plus, he'd have to be over 18 to buy that, so it's even more of a strange thing then).

So VNs are great for being raved about in enthusiastic texts and played alone, but I don't know if they're ready to become mainstream gaming around here. I think it's perfectly okay if they stay a niche market, because that's what they are and that's what they most probably will always be.

[Shii]

I don't expect more than a niche market, but the long tail can't just be chopped off. If video rental stores can sell Local Hero alongside National Treasure, then video game stores can sell less popular titles as well.

edit: On Wikipedia, I decided to use the phrase "anime game" to describe ren'ai, eroge, visual novels and all the places they overlap.

[rioka]

If video rental stores can sell Local Hero alongside National Treasure, then video game stores can sell less popular titles as well.

But then you have to consider the whole debate about shelf space and eyeballs on a limited floor space. You've probably heard all the angles to that so I won't go into detail on it.

[mikey]

That is maybe too wide, but I can't say I didn't think of this. It does have advantages, anime is (as well as manga) VERY overarching, and in the old days I described Black Pencil as a "manga game".

However, I still think that there isn't an effective way of merging the terms because they simply describe different things. Eroge, bishoujo, BL, yuri and so on are about content and VN, KN, DS, RPG etc are gameplay (game mechanics). It's the only logical thing for systematic categories.

[PyTom]

I tend to agree with mikey that it doesn't make sense to conflate the content of the game with the mechanic of the game. Of course, I believe that it should be further broken down, as mentioned above. I think that it's important to distinguish a dark 18+ bishoujo visual novel from a ren'ai 13+ yuri rpg... or at least, that there are some people who are interested in those distinctions.

Maybe it's the spirit of Carolus Linnaeus working through me.

http://www.tyth.net/wordpress/?p=290

Anyhow, there's a post about a classification system there... I think it's somewhat lacking, as it doesn't have enough dimensions, and so mashes aspects together in a single dimension.

[mikey]

That article is really a little messy, perhaps based on the belief that each of the terms mean something different.

In fact, some of the terms may be trademarks in Japan, and generic here, and others may be expanded, contracted, or mutilated beyond recognition. If they can do it, so can we.

Absolutely. There is completely no point in distinguishing between gal-games and bishoujo games in the English language, even if they should mean something different in Japan. In proper English, gal-game is "girl game" and bishoujo game is "pretty girl game". I think it's wrong to force their Japanese usage on the English-speaking community when in respect to what they mean their Japanese usage defies English language logic. Did I mention kinetic novel?

However, I have thought about yaruge, nakige etc and tried to make the handbook I wrote earlier more logical in this aspect. I'll have the draft up this evening, but in principle, I have made a third category and in goes like this:

Games can be divided and grouped.

You can divide games by their

- content
- aim (bishoujo, bishounen, yuri, yaoi...)
- relationship (ren'ai, light, dark, none...)
- age rating (hentai, ecchi - alternatively 18+, 16+ etc...)

- gameplay
- VN (multichoice, KN, limited...)
- DS/RS
- other (RPG, fighting...)

You can group the games by a theme, or common attribute.

- maid training
- yaruge
- tear-jerkers
- ... and many more

Anyway, tell me what you think. This I think solves the problem of some fans describing their preferred or hated games as a group (by grouping them), rather than describing them systematically (dividing them).

[PyTom]

A comment I have is that while the three bullets under "content" define three independent categories, each with multiple options, the bullets under "gameplay" don't seem to be as well organized.

I think that gameplay is somewhat complicated by the fact that there are two or more axes, but that we tend to name combinations of the choices on these axes, rather than the individual values on the axes. We also ignore some of the axes in our colloquial names.

I'd say that there are at least the following axes (and the names are fairly wrong).

- Number of Endings (Single, Multiple)
- Well-ordered story (Yes, No)
- Gameplay (KN, AVG, RPG, Life Sim, Flight Sim, Fighter, Etc...)

By well-ordered story, I mean one in which the events in the story occur in some well-defined order, if they occur at all. (There's a little openness as to what I define as an event here, however.)

As shorthand, we tend to have colloquial names for some of these combinations.

A kinetic novel has KN gameplay, which means no choices. Hence, it can only have a single ending, and trivially must have a well-ordered story.

A limited or single-ending visual novel is a single-ending AVG. It almost always has a well-ordered story, at least at the macro-level.

A visual novel is a multiple-ending AVG with a well-ordered story.

A dating simulation is a multiple-ending AVG without a well-ordered story.

Beyond these names, I think it's in general better to just describe the categories in full when giving a game.

For example, I'd say Heikou is a multi-ending, well-ordered, RPG. From my memory of the game, in general events occur in a well-defined order. (I'm treating the maze as one event.)

By contrast, Brave Soul is a multi-ending, non-well-ordered, RPG. It's possible to choose which characters are in your party and the order in which you get their events.

I concur that one can and should group the games by their themes, although I don't have concrete suggestions about how to do so.

[mikey]

Hmmm, interesting...

A comment I have is that while the three bullets under "content" define three independent categories, each with multiple options, the bullets under "gameplay" don't seem to be as well organized.

I actually noticed a difference in the divison of "content" and "gameplay". The thing is, that while the bullets in "content" are capable each one to divide all the games by themselves, the "gameplay"'s division is single (note the and and or in the overview)- so as you note further down, there might be a way for a new kind of bullet. Let's say...

CONTENT

- dominant game mechanic (VN/KN, RPG, racer...)
- path/ending count (single ending, multending, multipath, multiview...)
- ???

Ordered story... that one gives me troubles. I once thought about the so called "story structure" - horizontal or vertical
- horizontal - like a tree with shallow but wide roots - each branch is short, but there are a lot of paths to explore
- vertical - fewer choices, bud "deeper" plot

Or it may be that well-ordered means pre-scripted (not based on randomness)?

Well, I've uploaded the newer version of the handbook now, it's free to analyze - I did that before this post though

http://atp.manga.sk/gh2/grh2.htm

[PyTom]

Okay, well-ordered isn't the right word for the property that games may or may not have. Topological order is a better term. Basically, what it means is that if a comes before b in one playthrough of a game, there will be no playthrough of the game where b comes before a.

I think this is a good metric that distinguishes games where the game-maker fixes the order of events in the game, from games where the game engine decides at runtime what the order is.

This is a little more subtle then the use of statistics. GSK uses stats internally, but those stats cannot change the order of the events in the game.

[mikey]

You mean like Milk Swim, right? MS is very fixed, every path is genuine in the way that the paths never "cross". Kind of like a tree, the branches never go "back" into each other.

Wait... "path crossing - Yes/No" - would that be the term? (more accessible than topological order).

The problem with this though would be that you'd have to have good knowledge about the games to distinguish them, plus the value of this information for the player is for me undefined - why would you want to know that the paths can cross?

As a special case, I'll mention Transfer Teacher. The thing with its gameplay (and why it was so tough) is that it was designed with three path clones - a good path, a respect path and a bad path. Thing was though, if you made just ONE single choice that was labeled "bad", it instantly put you in the bad path - and there was no way back from that path - say if you made the bad path choice the very first choice, you were redirected to the bad path and the other choices you made did not matter at all - they were all dummy choices. So to complete one of the positive paths, you had to get all 4 choices right, unconditionally. One bad choice directed you into the jail of the bad path and there was no escape.

The example is just to illustrate - how would TT be categorized under this aspect - and how would anyone know (if I hadn't revealed this?).

[PyTom]

TT is obviously topological sortable. For any given segment, it's trivial to determine the segments that must precede or follow it.

Basically, the issue of topological sort is that it allows us to understand which events can come before or after a segement. In general, this allows the game designer to tell a more coherent story, as compared to those games that don't have this property. In those games, the story is more freeform.

It's actually pretty rare to have a non dag-structured story, at least in western games. I can't think of any fan games that are not dag-structured, and commercial games are mostly the scheduling/dating-sim kind, like true love, may club, or rpgs like brave soul.

[Sai]

Dunno if this has already been referred to yet but there's a section onf the Megatokyo FAQ about this topic:

http://renai.gwathyr.net/dsvn_faq_rev01.2.html#1.2

[Shii]

The Megatokyo FAQ seems to infer that if it ain't Japanese, it just ain't right.

[Sai]

The Megatokyo FAQ seems to infer that if it ain't Japanese, it just ain't right.

In what way?

[Shii]

Well, to quote a post I just saw on 2channel:

498 ：名無しさん＠英語勉強中 ：2005/10/09(日) 13:21:37
Wapanese are white people who call dating sims "ren'ai games" because ren'ai is Japanese.